The GOU immediately replaced Ramírez with his fellow poker player Gen. Edelmiro J. Farrell. Perón became vice president and secretary of war, while retaining his labor portfolio. His work in this ministry helped him to forge an alliance with the Argentine labor unions; together they put forward laws that strengthened the unions and improved workers’ rights. Against intuition, the military conspirator Perón increasingly became the voice of the working people, and now he was just one step from the presidency.
PERÓN’S PUBLIC RELATIONS BREAKTHROUGH followed the devastating earthquake that hit San Juan on January 15, 1944, which claimed over 10,000 lives and leveled the central-western Argentine city. Vice President Perón moved into overdrive; he was entrusted with fund-raising efforts and enlisted media celebrities to help. His work made a real difference in the region’s recovery and gained him great popular support. This was also the perfect time for his relationship with Eva Duarté to be revealed to the public. Accepted history tells us that Perón met the young radio star at one of his fund-raising events in May 1944; in reality, as we have seen, their working and romantic relationship went back considerably further. It was at this time that Eva’s public profile was created—as a girl from humble beginnings who used her achievement of stardom and social connections to work for the interests of the poor among whom she had grown up. It was a perception that fit neatly alongside Col. Perón’s pose as a defender of workers’ rights. This image of a beautiful, glittering champion of the poor—los descamisados (the “shirtless ones”)—would earn “Evita” unparalleled public affection, and indeed a sort of secular sainthood, which would endure in the hearts of many Argentines for generations after her death.
IN MARCH 1944, JOSEPH GOEBBELS made clear his vision for a new world order in Latin America. The German propaganda minister foresaw that
Argentina will one day be at the head of a tariff union comprising the nations in the southern half of South America. Such a focus of opposition against the United States of America will—together with Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay—form a powerful economic bloc; and eventually, by way of Peru, it will spread northward to place the dollar colony of Brazil in a difficult position.
The following month, Vice President Perón echoed this expansive prediction:
In South America it is our mission to make the leadership of Argentina not only possible but indisputable. Hitler’s fight in peace and war will guide us. Alliances will be the next step. We will get Bolivia and Chile. Then it will be easy to exert pressure on Uruguay. These five nations will attract Brazil and its important group of Germans [Brazilian-German immigrant communities]. Once Brazil has fallen the South American continent will be ours. Following the German example, we will instill the masses with the necessary military spirit.
On June 22, 1944, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Argentina; Great Britain followed suit, and shortly afterward so did much of Latin America. Argentina found herself in diplomatic quarantine, recognized only by Nazi Germany and by fascist-leaning Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Ecuador. Seeing this apparent setback as an opportunity, Perón rallied the extreme nationalists in the army and the labor movement behind him to defend their nation’s honor. However, the diplomatic freeze was followed by the threat of an Allied trade embargo (although such a move by Britain—which depended on Argentina’s huge meat exports at a time when the British population was suffering severe food rationing—would have caused Winston Churchill’s government extraordinary difficulties).
Despite the bellicosity of Argentine nationalists, the threat of a trade embargo and continued U.S. diplomatic rumblings did have some effect. In apparent moves to appease the U.S. State Department, the increasingly powerful vice president ostensibly clamped down on Nazi activities and closed down some German-language newspapers. Behind this front, Ludwig Freude continued to further Bormann’s plans with Perón’s help, but he was advised by his friend to lower his profile.
On November 22, 1944, Freude wrote to Gen. von Faupel:
In order to provide the smallest target possible and so as to facilitate the defense of our interests, I have resigned from all my duties in the German institutions, as well as in the industrial and commercial companies, and I have adopted Argentine citizenship. Let the Allied diplomats waste their time now faced with my position, which is as unshakable as that of Perón himself.
Freude also explained to von Faupel how he would manage to maintain Nazi assets in Argentina if—as by then seemed inevitable—Germany lost the war: “We have agreed to invent … Argentine [reparation] demands to the Reich, and to guarantee they are fulfilled [by] impound[ing] all the German wealth in Argentina.”
Freude made it clear that he reported directly to Bormann, and he asked von Faupel to smooth his way. He refused to have anything to do with either the Ausland Abwehr—the Office for Espionage, Counterespionage, Sabotage, and Foreign Information—or with von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office. Von Faupel was in complete agreement; he had never trusted Adm. Canaris of the Abwehr (who had in fact already been removed from his post in February 1944 under suspicion of anti-Nazi activities), and he considered von Ribbentrop a fool.
Gen. von Faupel knew how to keep his collaborators happy. Freude wrote that “the diamond necklace arrived with the last shipment, destined for our friend Eva from you. I have already handed it over, and have the duty to convey to you her warm and grateful greetings.” Freude was also lavish with his presents; when the widowed Perón finally married Eva in October 1945, Freude gave her a house in the Buenos Aires suburb of Belgrano as a wedding present. She never lived there, but Juan Perón used it for “quiet meetings”; in 1953 he would meet Martin Bormann there.
IT WAS THE LOOT OF CONQUERED EUROPE that provided not merely Evita’s diamond necklace, but the whole funding for the structure of Bormann’s influence in Argentina and the preparation of the future Nazi refuge. Apart from shipments from Italy and Spain by means of Bormann’s front-company shipping and airlines, a U-boat run began in August 1942, continuing at six- to eight-week intervals during 1943 and 1944. A single submarine made the trip each time, from Rota near Cádiz. A former officer of the scuttled Admiral Graf Spee, Capt. Paul Ascher, arranged the unloading in Argentina.
Among the many deposits made in Argentine banks, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had $20 million in an account transferred via Swiss banks in Geneva. Göring collected a whole range of high-paying government posts, but had also amassed a huge personal fortune from criminal activities. He had seized Jewish properties, taken bribes for allowing others to do the same, and—as detailed in Chapter 4—amassed an incredible collection of art looted from Nazi-occupied territories. As part of his role as director of the Four-Year Plan—the Nazi’s economic strategy to rearm and to reduce unemployment—he took huge bribes from industrialists bidding for contracts. He had even made money from supplying weapons to Spanish Republicans fighting Franco’s Nationalists. A plot to ship at least $10 million of Göring’s loot by U-boat to Buenos Aires was uncovered in 1943 by British intelligence, but the British dismissed it because they were dubious about the trustworthiness of their source, Ernesto Hoppe. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had $1.8 million in a safety deposit box at another bank, where Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop also had a box containing a more modest half million U.S. dollars. None of these three Nazis, of course, would reach Argentina to enjoy his loot, but before von Ribbentrop’s execution he told one of his confidants, Otto Reinebeck, former German minister to the Central American Republics, “Argentina is the last German bridgehead in the Western Hemisphere, the maintenance and development of which are of the greatest significance for later on.”
These personal sums are tiny, however—nothing but loose change when compared to the real scale of Bormann’s Aktion Feuerland shipments. The gold alone came to $1.12 billion at 1948 prices—the equivalent of at least $50 billion today—before one even considers the platinum, precious stones, coinage, art works, stocks, and bonds.
Ludwig Freude’s and Eva Duarté’s involvement in the smuggling operation was made clear in an Argentine police document of April 18, 1945. This detailed the operations of Freude, “agent of the Third Reich,” and his dealings with an Argentine agent, “Natalio.” This informant reported that Freude had made very substantial deposits in various Buenos Aires banks in the name of the “well-known radio-theatrical actress María Eva Duarté.” Freude told Natalio that on February 7, 1945, a U-boat had brought huge funds to help in the reconstruction of the Nazi empire. Subsequent police investigations revealed that cases from the U-boat, with the words Geheime Reichssache (“Reich Top Secret”) stenciled on them, had been taken to a Lahusen ranch run by two “Nazi brothers, just outside Buenos Aires.” Deposits of gold and various currencies were later made in Eva’s name at the Banco Alemán Transatlántico, Banco Germánico, and Banco Tornquist.
Ludwig Freude was the central figure in the Nazis’ financial survival plan. His original operation had been relatively low-key; as president of the committee of the Argentine Nazi Party he had set up local fund-raising, taking monthly dues from all party members and supporters. He kept offices at the Banco Alemán Transatlántico and was also president of many other Nazi front companies. Most of these were set up during 1942 and 1943; they extended through every aspect of Argentine industry and owned huge tracts of land in Patagonia. More than two hundred German companies established major offices in Argentina between 1942 and 1944. Specialists were sent out from Berlin to assist Freude, among them Heinrich Doerge, a senior official at both the Reichsbank and the Ministry of Economics.
Doerge was Perón’s economics adviser and the man behind the transformation of the Argentine banking system; the Allies had him marked down as a “Nazi considered dangerous for the security of the hemisphere.” (Later he would also prove dangerous to the Bormann “Organization” and would be among the trail of corpses left behind as Bormann tried to regain control of the Nazis’ looted fortune in 1952, see Chapter 21.) Between them, Freude and Doerge managed to hide hundreds of millions of dollars of funds, shares, patents, and convertible bonds in a complex web of Argentine companies.
Eva Duarté’s original recruiting officer at the German embassy, Capt. Niebuhr’s colleague Gerda von Arenstorff, would tell war crime investigators in October 1945 that in February 1944 the German embassy had 47 million pesos in banks in Buenos Aires and that these funds were made to disappear by transfers to “trusted people.” In February 1944, the German embassy also had seven safety deposit boxes in the Banco Germánico, holding gold and silver coins with a value of 115 million pesos. Ludwig Freude, in a 1944 memo to von Faupel found after the war, noted that other deposits to the value of $37.66 million had been made in a bank in Buenos Aires in the names of German and Argentine Nazis. Keys to the deposit boxes were held by two of the original poker players, Erich Otto Meynen and Ricardo von Leute, who had countersigned the deposit documents. (These men would also join the body count left by the purging of the “Organization” in December 1952; the coins simply disappeared.)
Share certificates were just as transferable as bullion, jewels, and cash. When the Germans had invaded Holland in 1940, they found shares of Compañia Argentina de Electricidad (CADE), Buenos Aires’s electrical supplier, to the value of $48.67 million, which were confiscated and sent to Argentina. Many major German companies were implicated in the transfer of assets to Argentina, including Siemens, Krupp, Mannesman, Thyssen, IG Farben, and Schröder’s Bank, dealing through local or Swiss holding companies.
THE HUGE SUMS AT THE DISPOSAL of Bormann’s and Ludwig Freude’s “Organization” had bought influence, blind eyes, protection, financial hiding-places, and cooperation in Aktion Feuerland to create safe refuges for important fugitives from the final collapse of the Third Reich. In the years to come, Perón’s regime would extend to thousands of Nazis—many of them wanted war criminals—a discreet welcome and continuing concealment and protection. But Juan Perón had personal plans for his own and his country’s future, and whatever his other faults he was a patriotic Argentinean. If for nothing else, the world may at least be grateful that he would prove entirely unwilling to allow his state to be hollowed out as the nest for any insane “Fourth Reich in the South.”
Juan Domingo Perón was a dictator, whose ruthlessness toward those who opposed him abused and alienated large sections of Argentine society. The “state of siege” that had been enforced by Argentina’s late president Ramon S. Castillo since shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor—including the muffling of the press and the banning of oppositional political activity or public assembly—was “retained … and improved on” by Perón. He briefly lifted the siege on August 20, 1945, ahead of promises of an election, but fifty-two days later he reimposed it. On October 8, 1945, Time magazine reported, “Argentina was back to normal. Anybody who was anybody was in jail. After fifty-two days of abnormal freedom, Vice President Juan Domingo Perón had again imposed the repressive ‘state of siege’ under which Argentines had suffered for almost four years.” Perón also smashed what was left of Argentina’s free press. He was desperate that the Argentine public should never learn of the revelations about his—and especially Evita’s—wartime payments from the Nazis, divulged to the war crimes investigators by the former diplomats Prince Stephan zu Schaumburg-Lippe and Edmund von Thermann.
Perón was a fascist, in the true sense of that term. He had been greatly impressed by Benito Mussolini’s regime, and he openly supported the Axis. But like Mussolini, he did not have the character to become an ideological mass murderer. He recognized—as his successors in the juntas of the 1970s and 1980s would not—that despite the reactionary instincts of many Argentines, they would never tolerate for long a regime of actual concentration camps. Neither was Perón anti-Semitic; he had many Jewish friends and placed them in positions of authority in his postwar government. We might imagine that the ghastly revelations that followed the liberation of Hitler’s death camps by Allied troops in April and May 1945 shocked even Juan Perón. They did not prevent him honoring his undertaking to provide refuge for some of the men responsible for those horrors, but we may imagine that they made him watchful.
BY THE TIME THAT HITLER was on the ground at Villa Winter on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, preparing for his long and comfortless journey by submarine, the refuge organized and financed for him by Bormann’s Aktion Feuerland was built, decorated, and ready. Two months later, on the windswept coast of Argentina, the last U-boat of Gruppe Seewolf would land its passengers.
PART IV
THE GREY WOLF OF PATAGONIA
Inalco, Hitler’s estate in Patagonia, Argentina, looks out on Lake Nahuel Huapí, seen here with the town of Bariloche in the distance.
Chapter 18
THE U-BOAT LANDINGS
THE AIRFIELD AT SAN CARLOS DE BARILOCHE, a lakeside town in Patagonia’s Río Negro province, was opened in 1921 as part of the global boom in aviation following World War I. For the wealthy German estancia owners of Patagonia it opened up the region to commerce; the British-built railway did not arrive in the area until 1934.
The U.S. journalist Drew Pearson reported on December 15, 1943, that “Hitler’s gang has been working to build up a place of exile in Argentina in case of defeat. After the fall of Stalingrad and then Tunisia, they began to see defeat staring them in the face. That was their cue to move into Argentina.” The airfield had been extended and modernized during 1943 as part of the Aktion Feuerland program. This improvement made it capable of handling long-range four-engined aircraft such as the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor and Junkers Ju 290, several of the options that Bormann included in his contingency planning for Hitler’s escape. The airfield was situated on the extensive lands of the Estancia San Ramón, a little over twelve miles from San Carlos de Bariloche. A dirt road led from the airfield to a large timber-built house about three miles away from the airfield, where the young Lt. Wilhelm Canaris of the German Imperial Navy had been sheltered
thirty years earlier during his escape from Chile (see Chapter 6, and Chapter 17). On July 26, 1945, German sailors—a handpicked party from among the stranded crew of the Admiral Graf Spee—were protecting the house in expectation of important visitors.
About 650 miles to the northeast, a smaller group of Admiral Graf Spee men were being mustered by Capt. Walter Kay on another airfield, this one on the Estancia Moromar near Necochea on the Argentine coast. Carlos Idaho Gesell had bought the property, covering more than 3,200 acres, in 1932. He developed the nearby town of Villa Gesell, which he named after his father; the family was wealthy and undoubtedly had close links to the Lahusen organization. The former first officer of the Admiral Graf Spee, Kay normally ran his operation out of offices on the seventh floor of the Banco Germánico on Avenida Leandro in Buenos Aires. Kay was central to facilitating the employment—by the Nazi intelligence service in Argentina—of his supposedly “interned” sailors. The men of the Admiral Graf Spee had been interned by the Argentine authorities when they sought refuge after their humiliating defeat by the British Royal Navy in the Battle of the River Plate in 1939. However, the internment was at best loose, with many men simply disappearing from “captivity.” Kay—despite his interned status—had helped more than two hundred of the ship’s gunnery, communications, and other specialists to return to Germany on ships sailing under neutral flags, but he had opted to stay on in the south, where he believed he could be of more use. Kay had motivated the remaining crew, many of them committed Nazis, to regain some self-respect. Six years had been a long time to wait, but even now that the Reich had been defeated they would have a real chance to salvage something from the flames.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 25
